Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.
Dorothy AllisonI need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.
Dorothy Allisonmy life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of being despised and not dying.
Dorothy Allison